Nationally happy: Is there a state of bliss or is it really a country?

Departures

By Thomas Swick, Special to The Chronicle

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, February 24, 2008

"When was I happiest, the happiest of my life?" James Salter asks in his beautiful memoir "Burning the Days." "Difficult to say. Skipping the obvious, perhaps setting off on a journey, or returning from one."

Like Salter, I always thought of happiness as a personal thing. But there is a new book, "The Geography of Bliss," that approaches happiness as something of a national trait. The author, Eric Weiner, travels the world in search of the happiest countries. And, because of the importance of contrast, he also visits some unhappy places.

He begins in the Netherlands. Amsterdam has become famous for attracting people looking for pleasure, but pleasure, as Weiner points out, is not the same as happiness. The Dutch, while pretty happy, are also at the forefront of happiness studies, having created in Rotterdam the World Database of Happiness.

Here the author learns, among other things, the scientific methodology for gauging happiness. It consists of going out and asking people how happy they are. On a scale from one to 10.

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It's not, he says, the sort of thing that people lie about. And he's probably right. We Americans have a tendency, when asked how we're doing, to say "great" even if we're suffering from the plague. But that's more out of consideration and convenience (often the questioner is already halfway down the street) than a calculated desire to mislead.

If people lied about their degree of happiness, then a country in which happiness often seems paramount - a country that invented the happy hour, perfected the happy ending, designed the smiley face - would rank as the world leader in contentment. And the United States is nowhere near the top 10. (One study puts us at 23.)

Switzerland lands very high on the happiness scale. Affluence and chocolate do a lot to create a national feeling of well-being. But there's more than that, Weiner says - there's also the human need, which the Swiss have not forgotten, to be close to nature.

Bhutan, he discovers, actually has a government policy of Gross National Happiness. The country shares with Switzerland a rugged topography and a certain reclusiveness, yet not wealth. Ah, but Bhutan is religious, while Switzerland ... not so much.

Clearly, this happiness thing is fairly complex. Iceland, it turns out, is a very happy country, despite six months of cold and darkness. Being a homogeneous society helps. And, secular though they are, a number of Icelanders believe in elves.

"I don't know if I believe in them," one man tells Weiner, "but other people do, and my life is richer for it."

They also have a strong attachment to their language; Iceland has a phenomenally high percentage of writers and poets.

But what works for one nation doesn't necessarily work for another. "Russia has always been a curiously unpleasant country," Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "despite her great literature." Weiner agrees that Russia is not a happy place, and goes on to say that neither is any country that has had much contact with Russia. In Moldova he finds the blueprint for unhappiness: a poor country without a culture.

In the course of his travels, the author comes across a few Americans who seem to have found happiness by moving to happy lands. And they're Bhutan and Iceland, not Italy and Costa Rica. Latin American countries, by the way, tend to be fairly happy. A lot of that is connected to the emphasis on family, a similar sense of belonging that ties the Icelanders to Iceland and the Swiss to their Alps. Leaving home, by contrast, means cutting your ties with the familiar, becoming rootless.

Yet, as Weiner points out, Americans' pursuit of happiness, more than any other people's, involves movement. We imagine ourselves happy somewhere so we pack up and go. But how can we not, being the descendants of people who did the same? Our belief in happiness is geographical, or at least transportational; we are a nation of happy feet.